‘You are driving me off the edge, pethi mou,’ Constantine confided with ragged bite. ‘Possibly a working honeymoon was not one of my brighter ideas.’ Suddenly he stood up, both arms anchored around her, and set her down on the edge of the desk, sending papers flying with a decisive sweep of one arrogant brown hand. ‘But then if I want to make love to my wife in the middle of the day that is my business.’
Rosie’s lashes fluttered. ‘I’m not your ...’ she began, yet her voice trailed away again, wiped out by the change she’d discovered within herself, the sea change that had crept up on her without her noticing. His wife, she savoured in a sudden stark surge of possessiveness that shook her.
Tugging the wide-necked T-shirt down her arms to entrap her and then slowly extracting her hands, Constantine delved his tongue between her parted lips with a growl of immense satisfaction. The hunger he could heighten with just one more kiss blazed a fiery trail that plunged her into quivering sensual oblivion. He skimmed caressing fingers over the straining pink buds of her nipples, making her burn and shift and moan with pleasure beneath his mouth, and then he was pressing her back, his hands skimming up her thighs to drag her cotton skirt down out of his path as he pulled her to him.
Clenched by an excitement that made breathing a torment to her struggling lungs, Rosie focused on him with wondering eyes, her racing heart threatening to arrest as she drowned in the passionate intensity of his gaze. Utterly entrapped, she arched her spine like a willing sacrifice.
‘You make me ache...’ His deep, dark drawl was ragged with arousal as he lowered his mouth to her pouting breasts. ‘I want to be inside you so badly, I’m shaking, pethi mou.’
The hot pleasure took her by violent storm, strangled moans torn from deep in her throat as he worked his way slowly down her quivering length, and by the time he reached the tensing, jerking concavity of her stomach Rosie was just a mass of melting, gasping nerve-endings, only managing to stay on the desk because he had her pinned there. He was torturing her and she couldn’t bear it. He hooked his fingers into the waistband of her high-cut cotton panties and she was on the very brink of exploding with the sheer force of her anticipation when, without the smallest warning, Constantine froze, grabbed up her T-shirt and flung it across her. Her startled eyes flew wide.
Constantine strode towards the opening door at the same time as a thunderous crash of smashing china and rattling metal sounded in the hall outside.
In shock, Rosie jumped a foot in the air. Other noises which she had tuned out swam back into her awareness. The phone was still ringing, the fax still buzzing. She blinked in frantic bemusement. Only one item of clothing stood between her and complete nudity, she registered strickenly. In broad daylight, she was spread across Constantine’s desk like a brazen trollop. Oh, dear heaven...
Constantine snapped the door softly shut again. ‘One of the maids was bringing in coffee. Dmitri intercepted her. He gave her such a fright she dropped the tray. I haven’t done anything like this since I was a teenager,’ he murmured with sudden rueful amusement.
Rosie refused to look at him. ‘Go away!’ she said shakily.
‘Why?’
She was burning alive in an agony of mortification. ‘Get out of here while I get my clothes on!’
‘Don’t you think that would be just a little absurd in the circumstances?’
‘Bloody hell... can you never do anything I ask you to do?’ Her strained voice cracked on the demand. ‘Do you always have to argue about it?’
The door closed with a definitive thud.
Pale as milk, Rosie shot off the desk like a shoplifter caught red-handed in the glare of spotlights. In a mad rush she fumbled clumsily for her bra and her skirt and then crawled about the floor until she finally located a missing canvas pump lying under a chair. As she dressed, tears drenching her distraught eyes, she studied the open window, and then, in sudden decision, pressed it wider to facilitate her exit. It was the work of a moment to hoist herself over the sill and out into the fresh air, thereby cravenly avoiding any immediate further contact with Constantine. Before she dealt with Constantine, she conceded painfully, she needed to deal with what was happening inside her own head.
As she clambered over the stack of roof tiles in her path and worked her way round a ladder, she heard a car coming up the drive. It was a bright yellow four-wheel drive. Drawing the brash vehicle to a halt, the driver vaulted out, blond mane gleaming in the sunshine as he looked curiously around himself. Rosie froze.
‘Maurice?’ she whispered shakily, and then she shrieked, ‘Maurice!’ and closed the distance between them in ten seconds flat to fling herself at him with a strangled sob of welcome.
CHAPTER NINE
ENVELOPING Rosie in a bear hug, Maurice scanned her damp-eyed pallor beneath her wildly tousled hair, an anxious frown in his bright blue eyes. ‘You look bloody awful... what’s been going on?’ he demanded.
‘Let’s go for a drive!’ Pulling free of him, Rosie div
ed into the passenger seat of the four-wheel drive and looked at him expectantly. ‘What are you waiting for?’
‘Constantine.’ Maurice mimicked the soundtrack from Jaws.
‘Oh, stop being funny!’ Rosie cried as she cast hunted glances in all directions, her nerves shot to hell by an absolute terror of Constantine appearing and dragging her back out of the car. ‘I think I’m in love with him!’
There it was, said, out in the open, Rosie’s worst nightmare come true, and Maurice didn’t even have the decency to look surprised.
‘What on earth are you doing over here?’ she asked belatedly.
Maurice swung the brightly coloured vehicle into an unhurried U-turn. ‘I’ve been promising myself a holiday for a long time. The minute you said you were in Majorca, I saw sun and sand and I realised where you had to be heading. From there it was only a matter of studying the map.’
While he drove down the steep mountain road at the crawling speed of someone terrified of heights, easing round every zigzag bend with an agonised death-grip on the steering wheel, Rosie thought feverishly about Constantine until her head spun and pounded with tension.
Bang! He had stolen her tranquillity and her security. And what had he given her in return? A hideous sense of inadequacy and self-loathing and a temper as unreliable as an active volcano. If threatened by Constantine, shout. Only last night he had been telling her that she argued with him to hold him at hay! He had seen inside her and understood something she hadn’t understood herself and that was terrifying.
The minute she had found herself holding fire on protesting her identity, the minute that she had found herself wishing that their marriage were a real marriage, she should have known that she was in love with him. But all Constantine had ever wanted from her was sex. She found him irresistible, he found her... available. If that tabloid hadn’t exposed their secret wedding, Constantine would’ve walked away from her that morning without a backward glance.